clearly this is moving northeast. look where the eye is going, northeast. it's very bad news for haiti, but good news for jamaica. jamaica looks as though it will get tropical storm force winds, but if it continues in this direction, and i believe it will, it will be well farther than 50 miles away from the center. that's how far hurricane force winds extend right now. so where do we go from that point? the latest a we saw it coming, the models are trending west. but let me stress. the overwhelming majority of these models keep this storm well to the east of florida's east coast. maybe they get a little bit closer, but the impact on the west side of florida minimal at best. if you live east of polk county, high lands county, maybe gustier winds thursday and friday based on the current track. might that change? we'll talk at that in just a couple minutes.

matthew creating concern in jamaica, cuba and haiti. 700 military family members have been evacuated from cuba. more than 50,000 people in haiti still living in make shift tents, temporary homes put up after the disastrous and deadly earthquake in 2010. this time around the storm could dump 40 inches of ra. stocking up and preparing for a storm that could be the worst they've seen in decades. >> chaos all morning. unbelievable amount of kerosene lamps, flashlights, everything. >> unbelievable shopping. way down there the line is. >> hurricane matthew already blamed for at least four deaths. a 16-year-old boy died on the island of st. vincent and two fishermen died off of haiti. follow the track anytime of day

it's available for both android and iphone. you can get the latest updates on your free abc action news mobile app as well. mosaic is suggesting that the toxic sinkhole happened completely on its own. more than a thousand of them happen spontaneously every year in florida, but human induced holes are real and it's possible this is one of them. we're looking into the evidence and the prior warnings. >> in a full-page ad over penned a letter to tampa bay, letting everyone know its efforts to catch contaminated water are working as planned. but it's this line right here that may turn some heads, suggesting sinkholes like this toxic one are completely natural. in other words, the company and all the work that goes on here had nothing to do with it. >> it certainly is possible. >> we went and asked the guy who literally wrote the book on

actually caused this thing to form. >> he's a former professor at usf. he now works at hofstra university in new york. he studied the issue extensively to help the public understand the ground we're walking on. >> most agree that sinkholes in florida are a naturally occurring phenomenon. they can open without any warning and in rare cases even turn tragic like this one. but there are exceptions. >> there are examples of cases where adding weight on t sinkhole-prone area induced a sinkhole. >> in this case, the sinkhole at mosaic opened up under a 250 million gallon pond of toxic waste used to make fertilizer. that's the size of 325 olympic swimming pools. one year ago, even the epa warned mosaic of potential sinkholes, ordering them to

it's too late now. >> storing acidic mine waste in a sinkhole prone area is problematic. >> to understand why, talk to the hundreds around mosaic losing sleep about the quality of their well water. in polk county, abc action news. he was trying to capture a pokimon, but sarasota deputies ended up capturing him instead. they approached him early this morning at the park, said he was there to play pokimon after smelling a strong odor, deputies searched his car, found 66 bars of xanax, marijuana, and cocaine inside the vehicle. a deputy is now being suspended and removed from the departments's k-9 unit after his partner died in a hot car. he forgot the k-9 in his car after going home in july. an internal investigation found he was negligent. the sheriff calls it a horrible

a family devastated tonight, polk county animal services euthanizing a family's beagle hours away after it ran away. karen explains how it happened and the lesson this family is sharing in hopes that it doesn't happen to you. >> christie has a big heart for special needs animals. that's why she rescued lefty, a beagle with sight and hearing problems and turned in circled from a past head injury. >> anybody that ever even p if they weren't an anal person, they loved him because he was unique. >> when lefty broke through the fence in their yard, the husband panicked. they posted on a lost pets facebook page and searched the shelters. >> i prayed i would be fortunate enough to get back some of that good will and get my baby back. >> when her husband went to the shelters friday, he got

>> it's heartbreaking and nothing is ever going to bring my baby back. >> animal control says lefty wasn't at the shelter yet when they called thursday. they scanned the microchip, but the phone number wasn't valid. the couple's address hadn't been updated since they moved here this summer. without finding the owners and because of his health problems, the shelter vet decided lefty needed to be put down. >> it was the perfect storm. it's very, very sad. we feel terrible for this pet owner. >> if a pet is healthy entered into a database and kept for at least four days before going up for adoption. all the shelters say it's extremely common for the mike chips to have the wrong owner information. >> a lot of counties use systems like this to see if your pet is micro chipped. you can go online and register the information so if they get lost, that's what comes up. >> go to your local shelter and register your pet there and get

here, all things this couple hopes others will do to avoid their heartache. in polk county, abc action news. tonight a county sheriff is suing his board of commissioners. the board failed to notify him in writing of changes to his budget this year which is required by state law. the board denied the sheriff's request for a nearly $2 million budget increase, but they kept his office at the same funding million county wide shortfall. turning to democracy 2016. joe biden wrapping up an event in sarasota, trying to evener jiez voters and get them -- enengize voters. >> vice president joe biden in

on voter registration. you can see in this picture he is still in the gym. there is a big, large crowd of supporters surrounding him as he's taking pictures and many selfies with the supporters up here. nearly 1,000 people packed inside the robert l taylor community center. 700 people inside the gym. i'm told 250 in the standing room. biden spoke for about 35 minutes today saying right off the bat if hill wins florida, she she touched on topics like raising minimum wage, college affordability and the need to bring outsourced jobs back to the u.s. much of the vp's comments were against donald trump, called him dangerously uninformed. >> he says i don't pay federal taxes, possibly for 18 years or

what does that say about my father who busted his neck 70 hours a week making sure that we had food on the table, making sure the neighborhood was safe, making sure that he was doing his part? i'm not joking. think about it. >>reporter: and back out here live in sarasota, the vice president still in the building greeting supporters out here. this comes first vice presidential debate taking place tomorrow night. >> ryan, thank you. still to come tonight, failing students given a passing grade while your child works hard every day. tonight the i team uncovering brand new evidence showing cheating may have gone unreported at clear water high school for years. and there is a look outside. lots of clouds out there.

doppler radar and obviously tracking hurricane matthew, down just about rea to impact

. tonight the i team uncovered brand new information surrounding a possible cheating scandal at a clear water high school program. >> we've been telling you about this for nearly a year now, a program designed to allow students to get credit for classes they previously documents showed students finished semester long classes in hours, almost always getting an 80. >> what's the problem with 80, 80, 80, 80, the same score over and over again? >> i would say there is no way that could actually happen. >> a student got this b after failing 13 of 15 tests. we talked to the teacher who gave the grade. >> is there any problem with this at all? >> no, sir. >> even after we took the

did not launch a full audit of the grad point program. then adam uncovered an email in our open records request and discovered just how long ago the school system should have realized it really had a problem. >> i don't want to be the one pushing someone through just to get numbers up. >> teacher kelly says she discovered the grad point program problems in 2013 when the school assigned her to grades for 250 fresh men at clear water high. >> i was getting ready to sign a grad point thing and i was like wait a minute, how does that student have an 80%? i submitted the grade yesterday with a 73. i saw one of my personal student's grades that i had submitted as a c also bumped to a b. i knew this was more than just a quick mistake. she reported the problem and resigned from grad point with

signing off on legal documents that i have no knowledge of. she was the second teacher to resign from the program. shortly after the school's assistant principal sent an email to all grad point teachers saying he would submit a list of names and grades for him to review when reporting accuracies. >> we were never able to verify the grades because they never sent to us what was submitted through grad point. >> the district was unable to prove the review ever happened. but something interesting did pop up in one of our records requests. this pete levine to a colleague said clear water has been cheating for years, topping overseas grad point and the surprisers. >> he monitors grad point and ensures schools are in compliance. >> that's lisa of wolf in the green shirt. across from her is melanie. they're spokes people for the district. >> she's his boss, right?

because he's part of the ops investigation. >> they say they can't comment about the investigation, but confirm levine has never been disciplined in his more than 30 years with the school. he says he notified the district about the cheating saying we'll see if they sweep it. he also said the vice principal told me to mind my own business after determining they're fabricating all of the grades. levine wrote most didn't even take the test and they gave them 80%. >> students completed year's worth of work within days, sometimes as little as two days. >> multiple teachers made similar allegations confirmed by dozens of student records, but the district says they found nothing wrong. >> we welcome them to come forward. >> we've been welcoming teachers to provide us information for months. >> kelly says her old assistant principal recently called asking

grades. >> he asked if i could make time to come in and sign off on those since i was the teacher of record of that year. >> the same grades she refused to verify 18 months earlier. >> how could that have any academic integrity? >> it couldn't. >> i team investigator adam taking action for you. now, the most accurate weather team in florida. >> how are you doing, everybody some before we get into talking about hurricane matthew, we've got portion of our viewing area, especially along the coast there, you see from the hyatt in clear water. titan radar shows you there it is, couple of lightning strikes. this has moved onshore from central pasco county down through holiday port harbor, indian rocks, all the way down to st. pete. as we said, this will continue to move off to the northeast. there is certainly more rain

going right into the mouth of the bay itself. it's going to take about three, four hours for this to wind down. i do think by tomorrow morning, it will be gone and we start to dry out, at least for the first half of the day. temperatures right now, upper 70s to mid-80s. tampa right now mostly cloudy with some rain and 80 degrees. st. pete also 80. 78 in clear water. there's a look at satellite picture. we had a lot of storms in the gulf this afternoon and that cloud cover just blew in from the southwest gave us overcast conditions. by the way, this has nothing to do with hurricane matthew. this is energy and moisture coming in from the gulf and it's going to continue through the evening hours. then by about 10:30, 11:00, it should be out of here. and then by tomorrow morning, you'll be waking up to partly sunny skies, temperatures in the mid-70s. then we're right back into the east-west flow that we often see in the summertime with more afternoon and evening thunderstorms drying out by wednesday morning. same thing, in fact, i think wednesday we actually start

before the rains begin to come in later in the day. after wednesday, it all depends on this. now, let's go over a couple of things. first of all, the hurricane center did indeed shift its track west at 5:00 with good reason. most of our models have trended west as well. now, it's moving north at 7, but clearly moving northeast. this is not a wobble. i don't think it's going to have a big impact on the overall forecast, but this is going to haiti and it is going devastating hurricane tomorrow morning as a category 4 hurricane over the western side of the island and then going over cuba and then eventually into the bahamas as a category 3 hurricane. once it travels there, this is going to be an issue by thursday evening. it's going to be somewhere between, say, free port and nassau as it continues to move west. then east of jacksonville on friday afternoon and then eventually land fall potentially in the outer banks of the

by then it actually would spread drier air into our region. now, this is where a lot of folks are starting to go crazy, because we're seeing some models that are bringing these over the coastline of tampa -- or rather the coastline of the east coast of florida. here is the bottom line: models will continue to go back and forth. they have been trending west. and i do believe the east coast of florida is going to get some serious impact out of this, at least winds. for us, polk county, high lands, hardy, desoto could see tropical storm wind gusts on thursday into friday. now, this might trend further west, which is why it's so important to watch us later tonight and on facebook. because at this point in time it's still three or four days away. a lot can happen. eventually it goes over the carolinas and out to sea. bottom line, we've been saying we cannot write this off. the models are trending more to

the west coast of florida. the rains arrive here in the afternoon over the next few days. thursday and friday, kind of breezy especially in the eastern counties, then turning drier and cooler by the weekend. it looks like a brutal weekend of injuries for the bucs.

. hello, folks, we know defensive tackle mccoy will be out a while, we just don't know how long. he was injured in the second quarter of yesterday's denver game. he had a couple of assists, a

the buccaneers today put defensive tackle john hughes in, he was drafted by the browns in 2012 and spent about a week with the patriots before being released last saturday. here's head coach on the injury. >> i hate to see the news of a player like gerald for any amount of time. it hurts. he usually is going to draw a double team. clinton mcdonald stepped up had his best game, though, and i also felt will did. >> mcdonald played well and we come to find out he did not injure himself during warmups after the delay, he just suffered cramps. he'll be fine to play against carolina on the front. we'll see how his shoulder is tomorrow. it's not definite and probably won't be determined until later in the week. gators quarterback may play

sprained knee. head coach said that he was targeting his return to this game. a few practices will determine that. an early one and a half point favorite in the swap. now that they successfully screwed up against north carolina, the new king in the state is miami. fsu takes on miami down south. they're three and a half point underdogs. this game basically fsu's season. by the way, it will be on here 8:00 on saturday night. >> cool. >> the buccaneers are going to turn it around. i keep telling my. we'll see you back here at 11.

tonight, breaking news. the monster hurricane. the category 4 storm already deadly. tearing through the caribbean at this hour, haiti and jamaica bracing. and then, the models show it coming toward the u.s. states of emergency already declared along parts of the u.s. coast. also breaking, donald trump answer tonight. to the bombshell headline involving his taxes. reports he might not have paid federal taxes for nearly 20 years. what trump says now. the outrage tonight over this video. a call to 911 about a suspicious person. the man telling police he was simply waiting for his mother to come home on her porch. >> what are you doing? >> then taken down by police. it was his mother's home. the aborted landing. the passenger jet and the